Friday, August 12, 2011

Amazon Cloud Drive to Infinity and Beyond

Amazon Cloud Drive to Infinity and Beyond

Amazon Cloud Drive still offers 5GB of free storage to every Amazon customer. If you purchase a song from Amazon MP3 however, the song is automatically added to your Cloud Drive, and you won’t get docked for the space that song requires. It’s important to note that this unlimited storage for all of your music only comes with the purchase of a storage plan, with the lowest tier being 20GB for $20 per year. The goal is to make the combination of Amazon MP3, Amazon Cloud Drive, and Amazon Cloud Player even more competitive."

Purchasing an MP3 on Amazon is simple.

Playing Your Music

You can play your music catalog directly, including random and replay at the album and library level. This is pretty much the same experience as Google Music Beta. The Cloud Player App installed without issue (Win7 64-Bit) and data moves were quick. But managing duplicates is still elusive.

As much as the layout looks like a typical Windows file structure, you cannot move items between folders. Your collection of Elvis Costello and his work with Armed Forces, The Attractions, Burt Bacharach, Brodsky Quartet, and Kojak Variety, will still be split into multiple folders. Google Music Beta (still invitation only) solves this by letting the user edit the album Meta data.

Evaporation and Precipitation

Unlike the Kindle Cloud Reader which clearly identifies where your data is located, it is difficult to determine if your music is only in the cloud or if it has been downloaded to your other devices. If I could push for one more requirement in the next version...